The Dapper Rebels of Los Angeles, 1966

In the summer of 1965, riots broke out in the Watts neighborhood of southern Los Angeles. Over a six-day period, 34 people were killed, 1,032 injured and over 3,438 arrests were made. In 1966, LIFE magazine revisited the site of the worst riots America had ever seen in its history. The photo essay depicting the region’s ‘fearsome street gangs’ however, turned out more like a fashion shoot for dapper style…

Click on the images to enlarge.

Decked out in preppy cardigans, high-waisted rolled up trousers and Wayfarers to boot, these young men of South Central Los Angeles were an unmistakably dandy bunch in contrast to the considerably oppressive environment they were living in.

The African-American community in Watts came to its boiling pointing in August 1965 after years of police discrimination, exclusion from high-paying jobs and residential segregation. Racially restrictive covenants had kept 95 percent of Los Angeles real estate off-limits to the black and Asian communities which severely restricted education and economic opportunities for them.

Where the black community could buy homes in American suburbia and live out the middle-class dream, significant racial violence escalated. White gangs bombed homes and burnt crosses on the lawns. In response to the assaults, black mutual protection clubs formed and became the basis of the region’s fearsome street gangs.

In the 1960s, the LAPD was especially known for its police brutality against the city’s Latino and black residents. The police chief, William Parker actually made it a policy for officers to ‘establish dominance’ over young black and Latino teens and pre-teens as a way of showing who was boss. Frequent beatings, wrongful arrests, assaults on women became the norm for the African American community. On the night of August 11th, the intimidation and racial injustices backfired and the Watts’ African American population reached breaking point.

The riot started after a young African American was pulled over by police officers for suspicion of driving under the influence. When the driver’s family got involved, they were arrested too, including his mother. Local residents gathered and the situation intensified. What starting with yelling escalated to hurling rocks, bricks and whatever they could find at the police. Twenty-nine people were arrested but it did not end there. By the following night Watts was in flames.

Rioters armed themselves and passionately shouted, “Burn baby burn” and “Long live Malcolm X.” Fires raged for four more days. A civil rights activist, Bayard Rustin wrote, “the whole point of the outbreak in Watts was that it marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting that they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life.”

Images found on this interesting Brazilian blog (written in Portuguese), Ubora, about urban retro style.

Zelda was revered for her design talent and best known for her skill in highlighting the female body. Her curve-hugging creations were worn and loved by a host of Hollywood’s biggest starlets during
the 1940s and 50s, including Joyce Bryant, Dorothy Dandridge, Josephine
Baker, Ella Fitzgerald and Mae West. The Pennsylvania-native’s key role
in glamorizing these women caught the attention of Playboy’s Hugh
Hefner and he commissioned Zelda to design the first-ever Playboy Bunny
costumes. And history has proven, the low-cut, skin-tight, sexy outfits
are an iconic symbol of seduction and by Browse to Save" target="_blank">allure, forever ingrained in pop culture.

A biography commissioned by Crum in 1893 made no mention of his purported invention.[8] It is possible that Crum's sister, Katie Speck Wicks, either made the first discovery herself or in conjunction with Crum.[9] A contemporary source gives credit to Cary Moon's wife, Harriet, stating that she developed the side dish over time.[10]

Detractors of Crum being the inventor of potato chips claim that,
even if those prior to him did not call them potato chips, a sliced
potato cooked in hot oil and served sprinkled with salt existed before
he first made them. Existing cookbooks from that time contradict the
claims that Crum and/or his sister invented potato chips. William
Kitchiner's book, The Cook's Oracle, [11]
includes a recipe for what could be described as a potato chip, even
though the cookbook does not use that term to describe it. N.K.M. Lee's
cookbook, The Cook's Own Book,[12] has a recipe that is extremely similar to Kitchiner's.

Coretta Scott King and her daughter, Yolanda, photographed by Moneta Sleet for EBONY in 1958. Moneta Sleet was the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who took the famous shot of Mrs. King with her daughter Bernice at Dr. King's funeral in 1968.

Olympic icon Florence Griffith Joyner, photographed by Irving Penn for Vogue in 1989. Ms. Griffith Joyner won 5 Olympic medals in her career (4 gold, 1 silver) and shattered two world records. The Los Angeles-born athletic superstar was also a superstar of style - designing her own trademark one-legged track suits and wearing brilliantly designed eye-catching nails that matched her outfits and quite often, the stars and stripes of the U.S. flag. "Flo Jo" died in 1998 at the age of 38 due to complications from epilepsy

In Mexico, the story of the country's black population has been largely ignored in favor of an ideology that declares that all Mexicans are "mixed race." But it's the mixture of indigenous and European heritage that most Mexicans embrace; the African legacy is overlooked.

"They are saying we are all the same and therefore there is no reason to distinguish yourself," said Padre Glyn Jemmott, a Roman Catholic priest from Trinidad and Tobago who has had a parish of a dozen Costa Chican pueblos since 1984.

"What they are not saying is that in ordinary life in Mexico, lighter-skinned Mexicans are accepted and have first place," he said.

Jemmott, a co-founder of Mexico Negro, an organization that seeks to promote cultural pride and political strength in the coastal pueblos, said many Costa Chicans often don't fully understand what it means to be black in Mexico until they leave their region.

Some tell stories of being confronted in other parts of the country by police who refuse to believe they're Mexican and sometimes accuse them of being there illegally.

"One couple was asked to prove their citizenship by singing the Mexican national anthem," Jemmott said.

In Cuajinicuilapa, in the state of Guerrero, there's a small museum dedicated to telling the story of the black presence in Mexico.

But Costa Chicans often say they learned little in school about how blacks came to live on the coast, little about the history of slavery -- only myths passed down over generations.

"We were told that a Spanish slave ship ran aground off the coast and the survivors escaped to and hid in the mountains, and the blacks today are the descendants of those escaped slaves," said Nino Robles, who was born in Cuajinicuilapa and now lives in Santa Ana with his wife and four daughters.

They were not taught the details of their history: that Spanish slavers took Africans to colonial Mexico (New Spain) in the 16th century, long before the first slaves arrived in Jamestown, Va.; that during the colonial period there were more Africans than Europeans in Mexico.

The Costa Chicans were also not taught that some of the blacks were not slaves; that blacks lived throughout what is now Mexico, working in mining, sugar plantations and fishing.

In some instances black Mexicans were explorers and co-founders of settlements, including Los Angeles.

Jose Maria Morelos, one of Mexico's leaders for independence, was a mulatto, as was Vicente Guerrero, Mexico's second president, who abolished slavery in 1822.

Earlier this year, the California African American Museum in Exposition Park opened a major traveling exhibition, "The African Presence in Mexico," detailing the contribution of Africans to Mexican history and culture.

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